Home-Town Boy

Isaac Mizrahi, the fashion designer, is the subject of a retrospective opening this week at the Jewish Museum. “The thing I don’t want this exhibit to be about is how old I am,” Mizrahi, who is fifty-four, said the other day, in the museum’s auditorium, where the raw materials of the exhibition—thousands of swatches, scores of sketches—were being sorted by assistants and curators. Nonetheless, confronting thirty years’ worth of one’s own work is likely to prompt elegiac reflection upon that which is past or grumpy complaint over that which has been lost.

“I look at tweed, and I go, Whatever happened to tweed?” Mizrahi said. He was surveying pages spread across the floor, to which scraps of fabric from his archive had been painstakingly Velcroed, ready to be mounted as the exhibition’s opening display. “There are no tweeds now. Well, there is tweed now, but it is, like, ‘tweed.’ Tweed that doesn’t feel scratchy and gross? Isn’t that what you like about tweed, that it feels horrible? Seriously, that’s what I like about tweed.”

Next to the tweed swatches was a scrap of paisley. “They don’t print fabrics like this anymore,” Mizrahi said. “And, by the way, these were shitty prints that were twenty-five dollars a yard. And the way they were printed was exquisite. Now everything is Xeroxed onto fabric.” He shook his head. “But I don’t want this to be about the decline of quality—the steep decline of quality. I don’t want it to be about that.”

It is the first time a New York institution has celebrated the work of Mizrahi. “I’m Jewish: I get an exhibit at the Jewish Museum,” he said. “They were smart, and they decided, like Jews, to call me.” Mizrahi is himself something of a New York institution—the personification of what has been characterized in this election cycle as “New York values.” He has crossed paths with two of the three New Yorkers—Trump, Sanders, Clinton—currently vying to run the country. “I was on Trump’s show, ‘The Apprentice,’ all those years ago,” he said. “Later, Trump said, ‘Oh, yeah, Isaac Mizrahi, he really happened after my show.’ I was, like, Oh, that’s why I’m so good, and famous! I was on your show! I forgot!” Mizrahi is a longtime supporter of Clinton. “I am not close friends with Mrs. Clinton, but I have made things for her,” he said. “I remember one dress was an incredible print, maybe for Chelsea’s engagement party or something. It was this overprinted brocade, with lilacs printed on it. It was very refined.” Afterward, Clinton sent him a handwritten note of thanks. “She writes incredibly wonderful notes,” he said. “She is incredibly funny.” He hopes that Clinton will be President, “though, of course, to speak pragmatically, no one would have been a better President than Michael Bloomberg. I loved him as mayor.”

The show recalls the pre-Bloomberg New York in which Mizrahi came to prominence: one gallery contains photos by Nick Waplington, showing the likes of Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell backstage in the nineties. “He’s captured that essence—all these incredibly glamorous moments, but also Save the Robots and Sound Factory and people fucking on speakers,” Mizrahi said, fondly. “What I hate is there is no artists’ enclave in New York now. Long Island City is gone. There are parts of Queens that are cool and fun.” He admitted that he had not actually been to those parts of Queens. “Once or twice, I have driven through,” he said. “But you can’t stop evolution. Some young person knows better than me. They don’t know as much as me yet; but they don’t know they can’t do things.”

The show, with its fifty-odd mannequins, is installed in what were once the principal reception rooms of the Warburg mansion, a stately residence built by the banking scion and philanthropist Felix M. Warburg. His widow, Frieda Schiff Warburg, donated the building in 1944. Today’s wealthiest New Yorkers could not emulate the Warburg gift even if they wanted to, Mizrahi noted. “They don’t really have mansions,” he said. “What’s the best you can do now? A giant apartment at U.N. Plaza, or a big prewar apartment somewhere. But that could never be a museum.” He gave a confirming nod, before turning back to his swatches. “You see: decline in quality, even for the rich. Steep decline in quality, even for the super-rich.” ♦